The Husband Hour Read online

“The story stayed with me since we last spoke. I think you’re onto something, but like I said, without talking to the widow, you’re missing a major piece of the puzzle.”

  “Yes. But I found her.”

  “And she’s willing to talk to you.”

  Matt, reaching for the project’s lifeline, said yes. Craig asked if his budget was still the same, and again Matt said yes, this time truthfully.

  “All right, I’m in,” Craig said.

  Now all Matt had to do was actually get Lauren to talk. For years, Matt had accepted the fact that the Adelmans had closed ranks around Lauren. But last night, in her drunken rambling, Stephanie had revealed that there was a crack in the wall of silence. Lauren was the direct route to finishing this film, and although it had been blocked, there was now a detour that just might work.

  Matt grabbed his wallet and rushed out of the house, checking his phone for the time. Wondering how crowded it would be at Robert’s Place on Memorial Day evening.

  And then he realized he’d done exactly what Ms. Boutine had warned him not to do: he’d left his keys inside. He turned back and tried the door, though he already knew it would be locked.

  “Damn it!” He paced impotently for a few minutes before calling Ms. Boutine. “Sorry to bother you,” he said. It was so loud wherever she was, he could barely hear her response. “I seem to have locked myself out.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Nora’s party grew rowdier as the sun set; there was less grilling and more cocktail-shaking. That’s when April, decked out in a floor-length spaghetti-strap sundress in pastel pink, tapped Lauren on the shoulder.

  “Lauren, I wanted to introduce you to my stepson Connor. He’s in town for a few days looking to buy a beachfront house.”

  April had more stepchildren than she had fingers. According to Nora, she apparently kept in touch with almost all of them.

  Connor was tall and blond and could have been April’s own son. He was handsome in a 1950s-movie-star kind of way. He was also at least ten years older than Lauren, and she’d gotten April’s not-so-subtle hint that he wasn’t exactly hurting for money.

  “Nice to meet you,” Lauren said, trying to find the balance between polite and discouraging. God, she hated attempted setups. Hated the fake casualness of the introduction, the way the introducer would drift away (as April did immediately) and the way the guy would look at her intently, ask a barrage of superficial questions, and then, when Lauren made her getaway excuse, say something about getting together sometime.

  Connor didn’t even have time to ask a question before Lauren excused herself with a quick “Just going to get some air.”

  Outside, seagulls squawked. A stray cat dashed across Nora’s small front lawn, rustling a bush as it made its hasty retreat. The bay-side houses in Ventnor, two towns over but just ten minutes from Longport, felt secluded because of the narrow side streets buffering them from the busier throughway avenues.

  Lauren settled onto Nora’s front-porch rollback bench swing. She inhaled deeply, enjoying the solitude.

  Headlights caught her eye as a car rounded the corner onto Nora’s street. It moved slowly, clearly steered by a driver who was searching for an address. Then the car turned into Nora’s short driveway. A door opened and slammed shut; she heard footsteps on gravel.

  Lauren dragged one heel on the ground, stopping the swing. The visitor approached the house, but the angle of the porch light did little to bring the lawn and front walkway out of the shadows. It wasn’t until he reached the front door that she could see it was a man.

  “The doorbell’s broken,” she said, startling him. He looked at her, squinting against the overhead light, and then it was her turn to be startled. “What are you doing here?” She gasped. “Are you following me?”

  The filmmaker gaped at her. Lauren jumped up from the swing.

  “Are you following me?” she repeated.

  “No,” he said, clearly as surprised to see her as she was to see him. “I’m—the woman I’m renting a room from gave me this address. I need to pick up keys.”

  “What woman?”

  “Ms. Boutine.”

  Oh my God. He was staying at Henny’s?

  She pressed her face into her hands, then looked up. “I can’t believe this. This is a joke.”

  He smiled. “I’d rather look at it as the universe giving us the chance to get past the awkwardness of the last time we met.”

  “You corner me at my job and call that awkward? I call it stalking.”

  “Lauren, I’m not trying to upset you. I really respect Rory. I think his story is one that deserves to be told. Don’t you feel that way at all?”

  “What I feel is none of your business.”

  “Give me one hour to talk about your husband.”

  She stood, swelling with indignation and a fierce sense of pride in and protectiveness of Rory. “That is never going to happen.”

  Two strikes and you’re out, Matt thought, heading back to his car with Henny’s keys in hand. Back to plan B.

  He drove to the house, retrieved his own keys, and left hers under the porch mat as she’d instructed him to. Then it was a ten-minute walk to Robert’s.

  The bar felt like a different place than it had been just twenty-four hours earlier; it was packed end to end, every table full. Waitresses weaved through the crowd carrying red plastic baskets of chicken wings and fries. On the jukebox, Steve Miller’s “The Joker.” Matt smiled. It would be okay. It had to be.

  He edged his way to the bar, ordered a bottle of Sam Adams, and hung back to wait. A table opened up near the kitchen, and he nabbed it. He checked out the plaque on the wall, an award from the Philadelphia Basketball Old Timers Association. Directly above it, a framed photo of a group gathered in front of the bar. A banner hung above their heads: POLARIS FOUNDATION FUND-RAISER 2014. He scanned the shot, and there was Lauren in the center, wearing a black-and-white Polaris Foundation T-shirt, smiling at the camera.

  An hour passed. He didn’t have an appetite but felt some pressure to order wings and the fried-shrimp special to hold on to the table. And it wouldn’t hurt to temper the alcohol with something.

  And then he spotted Stephanie’s blond ponytail, waving like a flag, in the middle of the bar crowd. Had she just walked in, or had he overlooked her? He slipped away from the table, leaving his drink to hold it. The crowd, as if sensing his approach, closed thickly around her. When he was within shouting distance, he called her name, but she didn’t respond. He reached out and tugged playfully on her hair. She whirled around with a dirty look and then, recognizing him, gave a half smile.

  “You again?”

  “It’s me. Matt from the Stone Age. I have a table in the back and I ordered too much food.”

  She hesitated, and in her silence he felt himself starting to fall off the tightrope. And then she said, “Perfect timing. I’m starving.”

  The basket of wings was waiting for them at the table. She slid into the seat against the wall.

  “If there’s anything else you want to order…”

  She held up her half-empty cocktail, and he flagged the waitress for more drinks.

  “So, you bailed on me last night and now you want to have dinner?” she said.

  “I didn’t bail. I just didn’t leave with you. And it’s because I didn’t tell you the truth.”

  She glanced at his ring finger.

  “No, I’m not married,” he said.

  “What, then?”

  “I’m a filmmaker. I’m making a documentary about Rory Kincaid,” he said.

  Stephanie slumped back in her seat. “I don’t get it. Did you follow me here?”

  He shook his head. “No. Seeing you here was a coincidence. But I did recognize you from my research.”

  “Why didn’t you say something last night?”

  “I hadn’t spoken to your sister yet, and I didn’t want her to hear about this first from you.”

  Her eyes widened. “You talked to Lauren?
”

  “Barely. She doesn’t want to participate in the film.”

  “What a shock,” Stephanie said sarcastically. “I could have told you that last night and saved you the time.”

  “Well, I learned my lesson. And clearly, you’re the one I should be talking to.”

  “Oh yeah? Why’s that?” she said.

  “Well, you knew him too. You were classmates. Then he was your brother-in-law. You have insight, and your perspective is probably more objective than Lauren’s. Less emotional.” He watched her closely to gauge if she was buying the ego stroking.

  “Of course I knew him,” she said. “Lauren acted like she owned him—owned what happened. But it affected all of us.”

  “I understand. It was a loss for the entire family. Would you be willing to speak on camera?”

  She smiled. “Sure. Sounds like fun. What do you want to know—how Rory was such a great hero?”

  “I don’t want to get into specifics now. Let’s save that for the shoot.”

  Stephanie downed her drink, leaned closer to him, and said, “I’ll do your interview. But you might not like what I have to say.”

  Chapter Twelve

  It had been a long time since Lauren had dreamed about Rory. In the beginning, it was every night. She’d wake up with a start in darkness and realize with crushing fresh awareness that he was gone. Now, thanks to that damn filmmaker, it had happened last night.

  She’d been running in her dream. Running, the way she’d been when she first saw Rory. Now, in the near dawn, jogging in the salty air of reality, she couldn’t remember the dream itself. But she could remember, like it was yesterday, how she’d felt that day.

  It had been her sophomore year of high school, early-fall track-team practice on Arnold Field. She was losing interest in the sport. Her true passion at that point was writing—specifically, journalism. Lower Merion’s student newspaper, the Merionite, was an elective you could take starting in tenth grade. It was a unique class, overseen by an English teacher but run day to day by seniors who had been writing for the newspaper for the past two years and were now the editors. She wanted to be one of those editors one day so badly!

  She ran her warm-up mile around the track, trying not to worry about whether she’d chosen the right article to send in with her application to the Merionite. She’d submitted a piece that had been published in the middle-school paper about the problem of the school running late into June because of snow days. She’d also included an essay about how her interest in journalism had started after reading Katharine Graham’s Pulitzer Prize–winning memoir Personal History.

  During her second lap, she noticed the boys’ ice hockey team running drills nearby. One player stood out. He was over six feet tall, with broad shoulders and dark hair.

  Each turn around the track, just past the bleachers, she looked for him, scanning the group. In the final stretch, the hockey team’s drill brought him to the edge of the track. He bent down to lace his sneaker just as she was rounding the bend. She looked at him, and he happened to glance up at that moment, and it was instant eye-lock. Beneath dark brows, his eyes were so brown they were nearly black and they shone with an intensity that made her lose what little breath she had.

  It might never have been more than that—a shared glance, Lauren thinking about him for a few days after. Hoping to see him in the halls, feeling like the Molly Ringwald character in a John Hughes movie.

  And then she got accepted to the Merionite.

  Beth surveyed the attic, overwhelmed by five decades’ worth of junk. She’d failed to sort through it after her mother died eight years earlier, and now her avoidance had boomeranged back. The idea of clearing out the space completely by the end of the summer seemed impossible.

  “What is all this stuff?” Ethan asked, sitting on a box.

  “Careful, hon. I don’t know what’s in there. Could be fragile. Here, come stand next to Gran and help me organize. Let’s get all of these boxes into three sections: stuff to throw away, stuff to give away, and stuff to keep.”

  He jumped off the box and scurried next to her. Truly, he was adorable. It amazed her how boy energy was so different from girl energy. After raising two daughters, she loved having a grandson.

  “How do you know what to throw out?” he asked.

  “That’s a good question, and that’s where you come in. I’m going to open all of the boxes—don’t touch this, it’s very sharp,” she said, holding up the straight-edged razor, “and we’re going to check what’s inside. Then I’ll figure it out.”

  “You’re going to open all of them?” His big eyes widened.

  She nodded. Fortunately, most were labeled. But it was times like these that she wished she had a sibling to share the load. Her girls were so lucky that they had each other, and they failed to appreciate that. For the life of her, she couldn’t understand why or how their relationship had gone off the rails. Her husband criticized her for letting Stephanie get away with so much, but on this issue she did not give her older daughter a free pass; the problems between the girls seemed to begin with Stephanie.

  Beth sighed, bending to read the faded ink on the side of a box. She was surprised to find her own handwriting. She herself had contributed to this mess? Beth/baking/job, she read.

  So that’s where they were! After turning the Philly house upside down, after literally crying because she’d thought her old baking supplies had gotten lost or thrown away. She sliced through the tape, pulling aside the wings of the box.

  “Wait, Grandma, let me help,” Ethan said, reaching for the tail of the severed tape. “What is this stuff?”

  He pulled out a cake-decorating turntable.

  “I used to bake a lot for my job. We did big, fancy parties. That’s for icing a cake.”

  Ethan peered into the box—the pyramid-tiered cake stands, icing gun, and cutting wheel—with obvious delight.

  “You made cakes with this stuff?”

  She nodded and dug deeper into the box, then squealed with joy when her fingers felt the corners of a book.

  “Oh, Ethan—I’ll be able to show you. This is an album I kept of all the beautiful affairs I worked on. Weddings and graduations and baby showers. Wait until you see some of these desserts.”

  “There you are!” Stephanie called from the attic doorway. She looked too dressed up for a day at the beach in her tight white jeans and turquoise tunic.

  Stephanie stepped over a box and stalked over to them. “What are you doing with him in this dusty attic? It’s gorgeous outside.”

  Beth felt like snapping, Well, someone has to pay attention to your son. Instead, she replied calmly, “Ethan’s helping me with a little project. Right, Ethan?”

  He grinned. God, she could eat him up.

  “Okay, well, Dad sent me to get you. He’s ready to go.”

  Beth had almost forgotten they had to drive back to Philly for the afternoon. Unpleasant legal loose ends, papers needed signing. Everywhere she turned, disarray.

  “Your father really could do this without me.”

  “No, you should go,” Stephanie said urgently. Beth had a flashback to Stephanie as a teenager rushing them out the door so she could have the house free for a forbidden party. Fortunately, there was hardly any more trouble Stephanie could get into.

  “Relax, I’m going,” Beth said. “Hon, take him to the beach. It is beautiful out. Do something nice today.”

  “Don’t worry about us, Mom,” said Stephanie. “I’ve got it covered.”

  Matt pulled into the sleepy cul-de-sac just before noon, the sound of the ocean greeting him through the open car windows. He’d been surprised when Stephanie suggested they shoot at her house but didn’t hesitate to say yes.

  His DP and sound guy parked directly behind him.

  “Not too shabby,” said Paul Garrett, his soundman, a native of Cherry Hill, New Jersey, who’d been recommended to Matt by a tech on The Disappearing Sea.

  It was a beautiful hous
e, as nice as any of the homes Matt had visited in East Hampton over the years. He’d always had an idea that the Jersey Shore was on a lower rung of the summer-home ladder than the New York beach towns. Maybe it was less desirable geographically, but there was an undeniable charm to Absecon Island.

  “Let’s do it,” Matt said, leading the way up the front walk. He pointed to a faded sign: THE GREEN GABLE. “Get a shot of that,” he said to his camera guy, a local named Derek.

  Stephanie greeted them at the front door. Matt noted her bright blue shirt, thinking it would read well on camera.

  “Hey, you guys. Come on in. I thought maybe we could talk in the kitchen?”

  Matt and his small crew followed her into a spacious, sun-filled room that wouldn’t work for filming—too much natural light.

  “Would you mind showing us around so we can choose the optimal spot?” Matt said. “We have to factor in a lot of things for shooting.”

  They moved on to the living room. The space had a casual elegance with a few eclectic design touches. He admired a stack of vintage suitcases.

  Matt looked to Derek, who held out his phone. He had an app that let him test the light and also calculate when it would shift.

  “If we close that shade and move the couch, maybe set the bookshelf behind her? This could work,” said Derek.

  “Do you mind if they move a few things around?” Matt asked, fully aware that “move a few things around” was a huge understatement. The next time Stephanie saw the space, half the furniture would be pushed to one side, the room would be filled with wires running everywhere, and whatever wasn’t pushed out of the frame would be arranged in a completely different way.

  He followed her back to the kitchen, resisting the urge to make conversation; one of the early lessons he’d learned in subject interviews was to talk as little as possible before the camera and audio were on. On his first film he’d gotten the best quote from a subject before the camera was running and then couldn’t get the guy to repeat it.